Blogs

Jeter's Next Big Swing

"I don't miss playings," says the retired Yankee, as the press-shy captain leads website The Players' Tribune, where DeAndre Jordan and Tiger Woods break news (sorry, ESPN) and backers are betting on a media home run

Josh Radnor Penning Memoir About Childhood, Experiences With Drugs

The "How I Met Your Mother" actor depicts real life events in the book, including drinking a hallucinatory tea called ayahuasca, while visiting the Amazon with a shaman.

Josh Radnor, star of CBS' How I Met Your Mother, is writing a memoir titled One Big Blissful Thing, documenting his childhood in suburban Ohio as well as experiences takingdrugs while in the Amazon valley. The book is expected to be published this year by Simon & Schuster's Atria Books, but no firm release date has been set.

There is little known about the project so far other than the following brief catalog copy which was released:

"The story of one man’s unlikely spiritual awakening — this is Eat, Pray, Love for those who would rather be reading McSweeney’s. Josh Radnor grew up in Ohio. He was driven to school in a big yellow bus. He watched The Cosby Show and John Hughes movies. He also went on to become a successful actor in Hollywood. How then, in 2007, did he end up drinking an indigenous plant medicine called ayahuasca with a shaman in Brazil?"

Ayahuasca, a thick brown tea that combines ayahuasca vine, tree bark and other plants, causes hallucinations and can induce a trancelike state. Amazonian natives have drank the tea for centuries mostly for religious purposes. While some music artists, including Sting, Tori Amos and Paul Simon, have confessed to experimenting with the drug. Beat novelist William Burroughs, who also tried ayahuasca in the early 1960s, admitted to vomitting as well as hurling himself at a tree as a result.

Radnor has starred as lead character Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother since 2005. The actor is debuting his latest movie, Liberal Arts, at this month's Sundance Film Festival. Radnor wrote, directed and stars in the film which tells the story of a 35-year-old man who returns to his alma mater and falls in love with a 19-year-old student played by Elizabeth Olsen. His directorial debut happythankyoumoreplease captured the 2010 dramatic Audience Award at Sundance.